Following a seminar course on science and ethics, the following papers will be dealing on the relations between robots, or intelligent systems, and humans, in a series called Ethics in AI. Check the previous part here.
Defining what is a robot to better understand ethics in Artificial Intelligence
What is a robot?
To begin, we need to be able to properly define what we mean by robot.
It is important to understand that a robot is an extension to what we call machines. Indeed, machines have been used by men for ages. Then from purely mechanical extensions, thinkers programmed those machines to become what we know as automaton, machines being able to execute a set of task automatically. It is uncertain when those automata were first mentioned, from mythological references to the first sketches of Leonardo da Vinci, but what we can keep in mind is the plurality of what we mean by robot. If we had to sum up robots to key characteristics, it would be embodiment and autonomous behavior.
Embodiment means that any cognitive tasks constructed by a robot are ruled by physical constraints. For instance, advices from the virtual assistant of our smartphones are the result of electrical signals located on distant servers. So they actually have a physical body since they exist in the real world.
Then, the other key characteristic means that a robot should be able to perform actions with limited human interventions, which should set the frontier between a brainless machine incapable of motion without help of a human and an autonomous robot.
To establish a proper definition of a robot, scholars and researchers gathered in an international consortium called EURON, for European Roboethics Research Network, that “aims to promote excellence in robotics by creating resources and exchanging the knowledge we [researchers] already have, and by looking to the future”. In their roadmap, Veruggio and Operto answer to the question “What is a robot?” by those points:
- Robots are nothing but machines
- Robots have ethical dimensions
- Robots as moral agents
- Robots as evolution of a new species
The first point illustrates that many consider robots as mere machines, no matter how sophisticated they are. According to this view, robots will never possess higher characteristics than the ones embodied by the designer.
Others view robots as having an ethical dimension that derives from the conception according to which technology “is not an addition to man but is, in fact, one of the ways in which mankind distinguishes itself from animals”. Robots are then opening up new horizons and extending boundaries of human’s grasp of knowledge.
Robots can also be perceived not only as moral patients (entities that can be used to perform actions, good or evil) but as moral agents (entities that can performs actions, good or evil). This view allows to see robots as artificial agents that can act or be acted upon for good or evil.
The final view proclaims that artificial machines will exceed us in the moral as well as the intellectual dimensions, making them not only better than us, but making us better. This would lead inevitably to a new species.
Seeing how wide the term robot is, we will focus on the idea that by robot, we mean any artificial entities with a higher intelligence than usual. An interesting aspect to understand the new relations and problematics that such intelligence involves is to head for the perception of intelligent machines in art and culture.
